


The Last Supper

by TheLillie



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, During Canon, Episode: e060-066 The Stolen Century Parts 1-7, Fluff and Angst, Lucretia is Sad, Other, Poetic, Unrequited Crush, Voidfish is Babey, magnus forgets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:13:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24411877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLillie/pseuds/TheLillie
Summary: The journal-keeper is paid most of its attention. It makes her room its home, floating out to play with all the others but always coming back to rest with her. Everywhere they go, there's beautiful things to look at and wonderful places to see, and the journal-keeper keeps it all, and the voidfish watches her work and falls deeper and deeper in love.
Relationships: The Director | Lucretia/The Voidfish
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8





	The Last Supper

The youngest voidfish is born into crisis. The rest of its family is wary, careful, distracted. They accept the groundwalkers’ offerings as usual, but among themselves, they prepare for the worst. The youngest voidfish is sheltered, though—it was born at just the same time that reality rippled, it’s never known anything different, and it doesn’t have a care besides its own little happiness. It’s just a baby. It’s living its best life.

When the offerings come in, for the most part the baby is bored. The other voidfish consume the writings and the performances and the artworks, and carefully deliberate over what to rebroadcast, while the baby snatches whatever physical pieces it can to collect and toss around and play with. Glowing bulbs and colorful shards from sculptures, bottles that contained scrolls that have now been eaten. A carved wooden duck comes in and the baby completely claims it for its own, enchanted and possessive. The adults let it be. As long as the little one stays ignorant and happy, they’ll be fine.

Left alone, the baby becomes bored again, and drifts out of the cave. 

It's there that it meets a groundwalker. The first thing the baby puts together about him is that he's large, and that he's red—not just his bright crimson clothes, but his warm complexion, his auburn hair. The next thing it realizes is that he's familiar. He's the one who made the duck.

The baby recognizes him gleefully and invites him into the cave. He hesitates. It sings to him, twirls around, and manages to convince him to follow it.

Inside, he says something, but the baby doesn't understand. It's never learned what their language means—it's never needed to. But in whatever way it knows how, it tells him how much it loves the toy he made, and, more importantly: tells him it wants another.

The man’s brow furrows—whatever he’s saying, it’s sad. He shakes his head. But then he says something else, a suggestion, a hope, and the baby bounces, and the man smiles again. He can make more. And he does—he leaves that night and comes back with more ducks, and the baby is elated, and he leaves and comes back with more and more again and again.

Soon he brings with him another groundwalker, a woman; she's small where he's broad, square where he's round, blue where he's red. The robe she wears is as crimson as his, but the rest of her is cool brown skin, moon-silver hair, periwinkle eyes, indigo journals clutched close to her chest. He gestures grandly to the pool in the center of the cavern, grinning, showing it off. She kneels and peers in and opens both journals and pulls a pair of pencils from where they were tucked into her ponytail.

In its few long months of life, out of all the music and art and poetry and wisdom and performance and pure living creation the mountain has consumed, this journal-keeper is the single most beautiful thing the little voidfish has ever seen.

She smiles, and it falls in love instantly.

For the next few days, they keep coming back with more toys, and the journal-keeper keeps her journals. She watches the baby, holds it, laughs when its tentacles try to weave into her curls, sketches portrait after portrait. For all the contentment it's had in its safe-housed life, this is the happiest it's ever been. For these few days, it's doesn't just float through the air, it floats through a dream.

* * *

The end of it arrives all at once.

The sky outside the cave goes black and the voidfish family begin their retreat, their hope that they can wait dormant under the plane’s surface and survive whatever destruction the storm lays to the earth. But the baby stops, the baby doesn’t know what’s happening, it doesn’t want to leave—it has friends here, it has ducks, it has lights, it has things it wants to keep—

It sees a figure run into the cave—him, the man, the groundwalker who’s been bringing ducks. The cavern is shaking, rumbling, coming apart; the baby bounces nervously and cries. It doesn’t know what’s going on. It’s scared.

He pulls a new duck from inside his robe and holds it out. The baby zips over and is a little less scared.

It hears a series of notes, a musical voice shouting into the cave—the journal-keeper. She’s panicking. 

The baby hesitates. It curls its tendrils around the wooden duck, but pulls it back toward the water, back toward its family. But water presses against its back, pushing it back up, and with it pushing a certainty from every single one of them.

_ He will protect you. _

And his arms are around it, into the air, and he’s running.

The baby whines and struggles, but he holds it fast, lightly hushing and humming. Around them, darkness is spiralling, pillaring from the sky in sharp and strange and violent bursts—but they’re weaving around it, the journal-keeper’s fighting it off, and they’re keeping the baby safe. And for the first time, the baby realizes there’s something else going on. This darkness, these piercing columns of black that it sees over these warm red shoulders, this is what its family was so scared of—

It stops squirming and holds on tight to its protector. This is what it’s being protected from.

They reach a silver ship, and the baby voidfish tumbles in, still wrapped up tight in the protector’s arms, the journal-keeper close behind them. The other five are here too, the red-robed groundwalkers who bent through reality in the first place, rushing into place and clicking belts and throwing levers and shouting to each other.

The ship moves. It shoots forward. The baby clings tighter to the protector’s shoulders as the momentum throws them backward, and the protector grits his teeth in an attempt to stabilize himself. The ship lurches, darts, flings itself around the dark pillars that the baby can still see through the ship’s spanning windows—

—and then it  _ lifts— _

—and then they’re  _ flying. _

They take off into the sky, into the deep blue night and the stars that are just barely visible through the shadows. They fly higher and higher, through the clouds and the moon, and through a bright fizzling gate high above everything that’s ever been, and reality ripples again. And the baby voidfish watches, in awe, in wonder, as they soar.

They’re not groundwalkers. They’re  _ birds. _

* * *

The baby voidfish stays on the silver ship. It grows aboard this ship, and as it does, it thinks about its family less and less, misses them less. It loves them, but it only had a year with them, and it’s having year after year after year again here—it’s starting to remember them less.

The seven birds are becoming its family. And by the stars, does it love them so,  _ so  _ much.

And to those it loves, it gives names.

It fell in love with the journal-keeper as soon as it saw her. The protector it liked and wanted, but couldn't fully give itself to until its family vouched for him, and he held it so close to his heart. The twins are easy—two figures perfectly in tandem, a he and a she, laughing and teasing and playing, bouncing off each other's energy and building each other up. Sometimes it builds like barbs, and they hit and yell at each other, but that's when the peacemaker comes in to wind them down—small, gentle, vibrant, wise. And the lover watches them, soft and sure and smiling, a steady beacon of affection for them all.

And then there's the wordless one.

That's what the voidfish calls him—a name just to say that he doesn't get a name. The voidfish loves him, but it pouts.

When the voidfish was new to the ship, it was the center of attention, and it reveled in it. Later the twins will teach it words like "diva" and "primadonna" and the voidfish will wear them with pride. It was everybody's favorite, the star around which they orbited, the top of the priority list—until the smallest bird spoke, and they all deferred to him. He was the head of this family, he commanded their focus. And the voidfish is growing now, but it's still young, and it's still prone to be self-centered.

The journal-keeper is paid most of its attention. It makes her room its home, floating out to play with all the others but always coming back to rest with her. They're traveling, never staying in one place for long, flying between realities whenever things get dark, but the journal-keeper's room is a place of safety and constance. Everywhere they go, there's beautiful things to look at and wonderful places to see, and the journal-keeper keeps it all, and the voidfish watches her work and falls deeper and deeper in love.

It doesn’t understand death—not yet. It understands that sometimes it won’t see one or two of the birds for a while, and the rest will become wary and fragile in their absence, but they always come back. They  _ always  _ come back.

Then, for a long time, the journal-keeper is the only one it sees. It’s excited by this at first, it wants to play with her, to entertain without anyone else distracting her. But distracted is exactly what she is the whole time—scurrying, disappearing, flying from place to place in single-minded panic. The feeling of safety is gone. For a long time, nothing is constant, and the still-young-still-sheltered voidfish angrily doesn’t know why.

When the others finally come back, the journal-keeper collapses into their arms and sobs with relief. They all hold each other a little tighter after that.

Then, later, later, they stop flying.

They just stop. They stay. Everything just...stays.

For some reason it doesn’t feel safe, though. Nobody wants to play with the voidfish as much anymore. Nobody smiles as much anymore.

It waits in its tank in the journal-keeper’s room and stays.

* * *

Then the voidfish doesn't see any of the other birds for a few weeks. One twin came into the journal-keeper's room at the beginning of it, distressed, looking like a strange lopsided fragment without the other by his side—he spoke and argued and then nearly fought with the journal-keeper, and then disappeared, and then she closed her door and didn't open it to anyone else again.

Since then she's been at her desk, and the voidfish has been too busy wondering what the rest of its friends are doing to pay much attention to her.

But now she stops, and stands, arms full, and the voidfish watches her. She climbs up to the open top of its tank and drops a dark blue book into the water. And then another, identical to it, and another and another.

The voidfish plumes up to them, prodding curiously, pulling out the pages and gently tasting them. And as it realizes what they are, it pulses and bubbles and glows with delight. She’s given it her journals—the story of their family, the seven birds, and all the journeys they’ve been on through these years and planets and realities—she’s given it their story! It starts ripping and devouring the pages in earnest, excited, almost dancing in the water. Their story is so wild and strange and magical, it tastes so rich and new, it’s going to be so much fun to share with everyone in this world—

Mid-twirl, the voidfish sees the journal-keeper through the glass. She’s climbed down from the tank and she's kneeling on the floor, and the room is dark, and her face is solid and solemn but there’s tears streaming down each cheek. She’s so sad, and she’s so small, and she’s so alone.

The voidfish stops and stills—because it finally realizes, fully: it’s alone. It can’t share their story, because its family is gone forever, and it has nobody with whom to share. It is the only voidfish in the world and it is only erasing.

The journal-keeper sees it stop eating, and her wet eyes widen. She presses her palms to the glass and speaks, pleads, sobs. Her usually soft, melodic voice is shaky and broken and lurching from high note to croak. After a moment, it’s devolved to one word, over and over.

And the voidfish understands.

_ Please. _

It tears and consumes another page. The journal-keeper’s shoulders slump in relief.

The voidfish eats, but doesn’t continue dancing. Whatever the journal-keeper’s plan is—because she must have a plan, she  _ must  _ have a plan for this—it’s hurting her. She’s trying to be strong, sweet lonely Lucretia, but she still cries.

It doesn’t want her to cry. It wants her to be happy. It wants to help her. It will do whatever she needs it to.

And then the door before it opens, draping the journal-keeper in a rectangle of yellow light, cut out in the center by the silhouette of the protector.

The voidfish doesn’t stop for him, even as the journal-keeper gasps and spins to face him. It wants to stop—it wants to leap out of this tank and fly up to meet him, it wants to scoop up the wooden duck he just dropped and cuddle it close—but it holds fast, it keeps erasing, for her—

He’s saying something—one syllable, repeated,  _ no, no!— _ and she’s cutting him off in a panic. He pushes past her toward the tank, and she tries in vain to pull him back—he’s so much bigger than her, she’s so much smaller than all of them besides the peacemaker and the wordless one—

The protector’s eyes glaze over, darting around in confusion as he stares at the voidfish. His face flashes with the reflection of every blocked memory, every moment of those hundred years and so much of his twenty before that—the voidfish is lit up like fireworks now. The journal-keeper grips the protector’s shoulders and turns him to face her. He’s unsteady. He leans into her hold.

He asks one last question, and the journal-keeper cups his face in both hands, wiping away tears he probably doesn’t even realize he’s shedding. He sways, off-balance.

His eyes fall closed and he goes limp. The journal-keeper catches him under the arms, but stumbles under his weight, and falls to her knees.

The fireworks fade. 

The books are gone. 

Gently, weakly, the journal-keeper lowers the protector to lie on his back on the floor, and she looks back up at the tank. The voidfish slowly sinks to the bottom and raises one tendril to hold against the glass.

Lucretia doesn’t lift her hand to meet it like Magnus would. She just exhales, shuddering and slow.

“It’s done,” she says. “It’s done.”

The voidfish pulls away, idly floats to the center of the tank. 

Lucretia bends at the waist, crouched, hunched on the floor over this unconscious body, holding her forehead to his. She trembles with the last of her sobs; then, then, is still. She tilts her face to kiss his hairline.

With a soft white pulse of light from Lucretia’s hands, Magnus is weightless. She keeps her arms around him and pulls him out the door, leaving the voidfish alone behind her. And once she is out of sight, it pushes to the top of the tank, and slides out.

It crosses the floor, and reaches out, and scoops up the wooden duck. The duck’s been painted with amateurish but devoted, beloved care—cool brown face, periwinkle eyes, white-topped head and red-coated body.

And the voidfish pulls the duck up to its bell, and it holds it there. And it holds it, and it holds it. And it swallows it whole.


End file.
